The present invention relates generally to the investment casting art, and more specifically to apparatus for severing castings from the center tree of an investment cast set-up.
It has been a conventional practice for many years to sever the castings from cast set-ups by an operation in which the set-up is held by the operator and pressed against a cut-off wheel to sever the casting gates. This operation is timeconsuming and is often cumbersome and difficult to carry out because of the weight and size of the set-up. In some instances, the set-ups are too heavy to handle and it is necessary to section the center tree longitudinally in a separate, additional operation.
The manual cut-off operation described above entails some risk to the operator because of metal chips, etc. Still other disadvantages are that the castings and/or the cut-off wheel can be damaged because of the difficulty of holding the set-up steady without twisting.
More recently, it has been proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,959,930 to provide a mechanized cut-off machine in an effort to eliminate some of the difficulties involved in manual operations. The machine disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,959,930 comprises a fixture which clamps against the ends of the center tree to hold the set-up. The clamping fixture is secured to a movable mount driven by a motor actuacted feed screw. In operation, the set-up held by the clamping fixture is moved past a vertically disposed cut-off disc to sever the casting gates.